Hi Anna,

> Yes, I need to apply to each branch, so people would bend the
> tree into a 3d organic shape.

Well, bending the whole shape does bend each branch along with it... But do you mean something like having some individual branches curled more than other ones or something like that?

Maybe if you could describe or show a bit more about what kind of result you want it would help.


> Do you think I should try a polygonal modeling tool, I have a
> licence for Modo, but I am not really efficient in subD modeling...

Well when I was talking about converting to a mesh I was really thinking about keeping that mesh in Rhino and just using that same Flow command on the mesh.

Notice how I drew 2 curves there, which work to deform the whole shape?

If you have a mesh object in Rhino instead, what you would do would be to draw 2 curves again but just around localized areas of the mesh, and select the mesh points so that the Flow command would only impact just those selected points.

Here's an example of how that looks - here I drew 2 smaller curves but notice how they are still arranged as a "starting backbone" and "target backbone":



Also notice that I converted your tree NURBS object into a mesh using the Mesh command, using a "Maximum edge length = 1" parameter to force polygons to be created at 1 unit intervals to make it finely diced up.

Then you select the mesh and turn points on (POn command) and select just the points of the branch:



Then run Flow and it will only work on those selected points:



You will probably need to carefully handle the selection and placement of the backbone curves to avoid too much interruption between the bent part and the unselected portion of the mesh. You may also need to do some strategic smoothing (select some points and run Smooth on them) if there is some roughness between the bend and unmodified areas.


Of course doing things in a sub-d modeling package would also work pretty well for this kind of deformation stuff.

Just in general polygon mesh data is more friendly to mushing / squishing / morphing type manipulations, particularly if you want to apply such things to specific localized zones of the model.


> I wish I could do this in Moi!. Do you think you will add some
> deformers in the future?

I do hope to add some in the future, but it is hard to know exactly when.

It is a difficult area to deform a solid that is made up of many trimmed and joined pieces and still have the joined edges stay connected to one another within tolerance.

- Michael